Laracon US 2025 recap, Part 2

As promised in my previous Part 1 post from last week about Laracon US 2025, here's Part 2 with some of the key takeaways and other highlights that I got from each speaker's presentation from both days of the conference. But before I get ahead of myself, Laravel did officially post everything that they announced in their blog post "Everything We Announced at Laracon US 2025", which contains all of the main highlights related to the framework and cloud services.

Going in order of presentation, below were my takeaways and highlights from each speaker:

Day 1 (Tuesday 7/29)

• Laracon US 2025 Day 1 recorded livestream

Aaron Francis (Laravel developer & course instructor) - You Can Just Do Things

The biggest thing that Francis mentioned in his opening speech was that he became the MC of Laracon US (although I have no idea how long he's been the MC of Laracon) simply because he took the initiative to ask Taylor Otwell by sending a message to the effect of "Hey I want to do it, I want to be the MC of Laracon" and apparently Otwell responded with "Cool, you're in!" Which aptly goes to demonstrate the age-old point of "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take"!

Francis ended his speech by encouraging the audience "whatever it is that you want to do (starting a blog, a side project, etc), just start".

Nuno Maduro (Laravel Core Team & creator of Pest) - Pest 4

Since Maduro's presentation was heavily code-focused in showing how to write unit tests for an application, I'd recommend watching it on the recorded livestream (which has timestamps provided so you can easily jump to it). Throughout his presentation, he showed that Pest 4 is extremely capable and flexible as a testing framework.

Pest 4 is an E2E browser testing framework for PHP that's powered by Playwright, and Maduro demoed its basic capabilities but also covered features in version 4 such as "smoke testing" which allows you to test every route in your app by using such methods as $response->assertNoJavaScriptErrors() (which can go beyond reporting just 200 status codes), and assertNoConsoleLogs(), which can be used to find console.log() statements.

But the new standout feature in version 4 that Maduro demonstrated was Visual Testing, where Pest can take screenshots of your application and compare successive screenshots to a baseline one, so that you can identify any visual changes affected by CSS, and even compare screens against specific viewports! Maduro blew away the audience by also showing the "--parallel" command-line option, which as you would expect, allows it to run in parallel, and another "--shard" option which allows it to run in shards. Using the "parallel" option, Maduro compared a Pest 4 run which completed in just 1.97 seconds, against a Laravel Dusk run which completed in 10 seconds!

TJ Miller (Principal Engineer @ Geocodio and author of Prism PHP) - Prism & AI

Miller had a similarly code-focused presentation demoing Prism for PHP to show off how AI can be used within PHP applications for specific tasks like test case generation (for unit testing), image generation, and even audio generation, and that it was remarkably easy to create chat UIs with Prism, and it can also be used to save prompt results to an AI model which can then be saved to a database.

Some of the more unexpected and very cool tasks that he mentioned Prism being able to handle were ones such as "Analyze this screenshot and create a GitHub issue" and "Extract all tasks, requirements, and deadlines from this document", and using Prism to generate images of 3D scenes, which could then show any text in a very integrated way within the scene, such as on a virtual billboard. I'd highly suggest watching the recorded livestream to see what it was capable of in generating these images!

Miller showed the audience part of his AI prompt to create a scene, to demo Prism PHP’s image generation capabilities:

From the above prompt, Miller showed the resulting image generated by Prism PHP:

Mary Perry (Web & Data Integrations @ Manifold Digital) - Design Patterns in Laravel

Perry provided an excellent review of how the Laravel framework internally uses many design patterns, including Singleton, Factory, Facade, Inversion of Control, Builder, Iterator, Strategy, Command, and Observer.

It was especially helpful to see where these design patterns are used within Laravel, such as Builder which is used in Laravel's Bootstrap module for Kernel, Pipeline, and Middleware, that the DatabaseSessionHandler is an example of a singleton, and the Aggregator pattern works with Iterator to provide access to elements of an aggregate object.

Thiery Laverdure (Founder of Space Studio & creator of LiteBase) - You Should Reinvent The Wheel

Laverdure had an excellent presentation of a simple yet complicated problem - how can you still use SQLite (a local flat-file database) when you have a distributed app? As he mentioned, every part of your application does need access to the same SQLite instance. But from this simple question, he addressed how he overcame that problem while working on it during COVID, and finally implemented LiteBase using his own Litebase Query Transfer Protocol which he also created, and provided a solution to the problem of SQLite not being distributable.

Litebase hasn't been released yet but you can apply now for access on its website.

Chris Morrell (CEO & CTO of InterNACHI) - Advanced Eloquent Relations

Morrell's presentation was a review of what's possible in the latest version of the Eloquent ORM, and that it now supports both lazy loading and eager loading for working with data sets of varying sizes. It's also now very easy to load all related data with just one hasMany or hasNear query, and also easy to create a dynamic relationship between words and letters using hasLetter.

John Drexler (Partner & Product Manager @ Thunk) - Building the High Trust Environment

Drexler's biggest immediate point for the audience was in saying "your biggest problems are not technical but...are about trust and communication" and provided an excellent short list of recommended action items:

• Show your work (early and often)

• Have something to show, every week, no matter what

• It is your responsibility to make your value obvious and incontrovertible

• Build vertically, not horizontally (full-stack vertical slices) (frontend tests, validation, frontend, controllers, backend tests, controller logic)

• Communication: is a skill, is the transmission of a message, is not talking when no one is listening, is not assigning an issue, is not posting a doc

• Treat communication as a skill

• Ask for feedback (most important that he mentioned)

Taylor Otwell (Founder/CEO @ Laravel), Joe Tannenbaum (Senior SWE @ Laravel), Ashley Hindle (AI Engineer @ Laravel), David Hill (Head of Design @ Laravel), James Brooks (Forge Team Lead @ Laravel), Joe Dixon (Cloud Team Lead @ Laravel) - Opening Keynote

Otwell opened the keynote by pointing to Laravel.com's new Changelog available at https://laravel.com/docs/changelog, which as you'd expect lists of all the framework's recent changes, and on a related note, also dropped that he "still sees every line of code added to the framework"!

Tannenbaum briefly covered the "broadcasting" module (php artisan install:broadcasting) which can automatically set up variables in your .env file and provides useEcho hooks for React and Vue on public, presence, and private channels, and useStream hooks for consuming streams on the client side. New packages called Wayfinder and Ranger are also now available - Wayfinder can introspect your routes and allow you to inject types into TypeScript for front-end introspection, while Ranger can walk your app and generate models from schemas.

Hindle briefly covered Laravel Boost, an AI coding starter kit which provides guidelines to control AI the way that you want to.

Hill notably mentioned that Laravel currently has a design team of 6 people working on Laravel Cloud and on other services.

Otwell returned to this stage at this point to introduce new lower pricing on events in Nightwatch, and the launch of a Slack integration for Nightwatch so that it can announce events to channels.

Brooks announced the new updates to Laravel Forge (which was internally known as "Forge 2.0") and now has an all-new design implemented in Vue 3, TypeScript, and Inertia. Now users need only one account whether you're an individual, or also part of a team or company, through the new organizational roles called Circles. Also newly added to Forge is a Notification Center that organizes all notifications together.

Otwell returned to the stage to announce that the former Sandbox plan in Laravel Cloud is now called "Starter" and offers a custom domain for everyone at a newly reduced price of $5-$6/month, down from the previous price of $25-$30/month. There is also no more "per hour" pricing but just "per month" starting on August 12, 2025. Lastly, Otwell mentioned production-ready MySQL is available right inside Laravel Cloud for $6/month, and that he's aiming to provide all in-house infrastructure that sits right next to your application.

Dixon closed the keynote by mentioning that Laravel Cloud has now completely done away with the previous modal approach on the website and migrated to a whole-page approach without modals, it can pull in avatars from GitHub to identify organizations, there's a search filter for organizations as a “quality of life” feature, there are now links to deployment and your GitHub repo (which are both synchronized so you only need to clone, which will auto-sync your Git pushes), and that there are also managed queue clusters, including Autoscaling and Threshold options.

Day 2 (Wednesday 7/30)

• Laracon US 2025 Day 2 recorded livestream

Evan You (creator of Vue.js) - Vue retrospective & roadmap updates

You provided a lot of interesting statistics and tidbits on the Vue project since its beginning:

Vue to date:

• 10k+ commits

• 500+ releases

• 2M+ users worldwide

• ~7M weekly npm downloads

• 1B+ monthly CDN requests on JSDelivr

Vue 3 growth has been 67% YOY (year over year). There is currently no Vue 4 release on the horizon. Vue's current focus is on: DX (developer experience), stability, and internal improvements.

Coming up in version 3.6 of Vue: reactivity refactor (alien signals) + Vapor mode (an alternative SFC compilation strategy for extreme performance). Vapor mode will be on the same level of performance with Solid and Svelte 5, will have a bundle size of 7kb, and will have only the Composition API (not the Options API).

Vite now has 32M weekly npm downloads, and finally just overtook Webpack this past week!

Alex Six (Senior Engineer @ Zillow) - Turbocharging Your Laravel Development With The Terminal

Six's presentation covered tmux, which as he mentioned solves a few different traditional problems that terminal windows have of: (1) being hard to find, (2) fragile and short-lived, and (3) not easily portable. In addition, tmux can be enhanced with more features through tmuxinator, smug, or sesh.

Six provides a tmux starter kit on his GitHub here: https://github.com/alexandersix/tmux-starter

Wade Wegener (Chief Ecosystem & Growth Officer @ DigitalOcean) - Laravel Meets AI With DigitalOcean

Wegener reported that today there are 3M+ active devs on DigitalOcean, 638K customers using DigitalOcean across 190 countries, and 17 DO datacenters around the world. Two years ago the company acquired PaperSpace to provide AI features on its platform, and now offers fully managed RAG solutions.

Dave Hicking (Agency Partnerships @ Laravel) - AI Will Not Replace You

Hicking provided a motivational and inspirational speech that empowered the room of developers in saying there's now "More software than ever before - every day, week, month. We can use AI to create vibe-coded prototypes, but humans still define outcomes. If anyone still feels left behind because of AI, it's not too late, this is the Pets.com era [where anything is possible]. History will rhyme [repeat itself], but now we can use AI to solve interesting problems that we otherwise wouldn't be able to. For all of its benefits, AI cannot generate taste, so embrace your own humanity and create."

It was short, but a powerful reminder that AI is still just a tool, and that it's never too late to learn.

Zuzana Kunckova (Founder of Larabelles) - Writing Resilient Code

Kunckova provided a recorded video message on the virtues of resilient code that's "designed to withstand, recover from, and adapt to unexpected circumstances without crashing or behaving unpredictably" and included an excellent short list of key things to remember:

• Input validation and sanitization

• Error handling

• Monitoring and logging (should be helpful and let you debug, have alerts in place)

• Error recovery (needs to be able to retry connections and not lose data)

• Handling third-party downtime (show cached content and retry connection)

• Graceful degradation (users should not be logged out if something essential breaks) (if JS doesn't load, make sure you display a fallback)

• Test edge cases

• Anticipate failure and breaks

Dave Kiss (Developer Community Lead @ Mux) - Turning A Next.js Video App Into A Laravel Starter Kit

Kiss demonstrated the Laravel application that was running at their sponsor expo table, where conference attendees could record 3-second clips of themselves in front of a camera and then share via social media. It was an insightful look into using different APIs (MediaRecorder in the browser), Mux's webhooks for receiving video data, and Laravel Inertia and Wayfinder.

Mux has a public repo on GitHub that contains the code at https://github.com/muxinc/guestbook, which can used from Laravel using the command:

Laravel new my-guestbook --using=muxinc/guestbook

Leah Thompson (Marketing Engineer @ Laravel) - Making It Feel Right: UI That Connects

Thompson started by attesting to being the person behind the redesigned website for Laracon US 2025 and in fact, further clarified that she started at Laravel earlier this year in March 2025.

Her 5-step formula for creating interfaces that connect:

1. spacing and padding

2. fonts

3. layering

4. fun element, something weird

5. animation and interaction (Rombo for animation)

Colin DeCarlo (Crew Chief @ Vehikl) - AI And You: Understanding, Watching, And Embracing

DeCarlo provided an in-depth look at how AI models are actually measured through benchmarks such as SWE-Bench Verified, Aider Polyglot, and HumanEval (the "OG"). While Aider PolyGlot is quickly becoming a go-to by learning from 225 Exercism code challenges and uses code that we use everyday (such as precise minimal code modifications), there is no best model, and models are generally best in class (might be good at editing code but struggle in general knowledge).

AI models can offer 3 different modes, which DeCarlo mentioned having these particular use cases and prompts:

1. Ask - explore and explain - i.e. "What contracts does invoiceBatch process on?"

2. Edit - precise, file-scoped changes to specific files

3. Agent - multi-file, autonomous refactoring and generation - i.e. "Migrate authentication to Laravel Sanctum"

Tom Crary (President/COO @ Laravel) - The Best Team Money Can Buy

Crary (formerly at Pond5, which was acquired by Shutterstock) mentioned being a first-time speaker at any Laracon, but while he may very well have been nervous on stage, it certainly didn't show once he jumped into his presentation.

Crary mentioned meeting with Taylor Otwell in November 2023 and hearing Otwell's vision for Laravel through managed cloud services, and how creating culture was the key objective at the time, in fact reinforcing that "culture eats strategy for breakfast". Laravel as a company very quickly expanded in 2024 with its first hire in March 2024 being Andre Valentin to create Laravel's "focus teams". Joe Dixon, Jess Archer, James Brooks, Dires Vints, Mohamed Said, Mior Khairuddin, and Christoph Rumpel were all hired right around the same time in March 2024, after which the company aggressively hired until June 2024, expanding from 10 to 35 full-time. Chris Fidao (the first key engineering hire) also joined in March 2024, while 2 months later Justin Reasoner from WP Engine (cloud, infra, K8 experience) was brought on, and 1 month later Florian Beer (networking, monitoring, reliability engineering) joined. David Hill, Hank Taylor, Michael Ryan, Josh Cirre, and Calvin Schemanksi (from Ford Motor Design) were all brought on shortly after June 2024.

Crary reported that during Laracon US 2024 (held August 27-28 that year), Laravel had 35 employees, but today the company has 80 worldwide!

Caleb Porzio (creator of Laravel Livewire) - Livewire 4

Porzio reported upfront that version 4 of Livewire wasn't a rewrite and thus has no breaking changes, but now offers a lot of cool new things.

Some of those cool new things are that it can insert emoji into filenames (which has no useful advantage other than to just look cool), intercept requests (after a page changes, you can do something else, or cancel the request), and now has slots in modals and components. But probably the coolest new thing from Livewire 4 that Porzio demoed was a new addition called Blaze that can be put in front of Blade components which does code folding to identify what doesn't change and render that at compile time, and thus can dramatically speed up things like a large data table. @island and @endisland directives can be used to isolate Blade templates to not re-render those, while @placeholder and @endplaceholder directives can be used for lazy loading. Using Blaze, Porzio showed how it reduced render time to being nearly as fast as using require or inline (30ms) while Blade components took 378ms to render, even when cached.

Rissa Jackson (freelance developer) - Is there any problem Git interactive rebase can't solve?

Jackson's short answer to this question was "yes", but she also took some time to show a few commands within Git such as reword, squash, and fixup to demonstrate how to rebase a Git branch.

Will King (Design Engineer @ Snowflake) - A Framework for Ambitious Projects

King started out by demoing a game that he'd created with Laravel, React, and Tailwind CSS, but towards the end of his presentation, he transitioned to a very inspirational speech containing these key points:

• An ambitious project will help you in ways that you don't expect

• Every expert starts as an explorer

• Friction creates fulfillment

• Don't leave success up to chance

• You don't need to succeed to be successful

• No one can be ambitious for you, get out there, start building and explore

• You have to tell people exactly what you want to do and what you're good at

Hank Taylor & Sam Sappenfield (Marketing @ Laravel) - Laravel Community Update

Taylor and Sappenfield provided some very cool statistics and updates for the community:

• since January 2025, there's been 760 PRs (on GitHub) to the Laravel framework + 800 PRs across all other packages and documentation

• 230K installs of the Laravel VS Code extension

• Laravel Idea is now free for all PHPStorm users (https://laravel-idea.com/)

• 136/100/145K installs of React/Vue/Livewire (respectively)

• +25% monthly downloads of Laravel since the last Laracon US (in August 2024)

PHP Fundamentals and Laravel Bootcamp are coming soon as courses on Laravel Learn at https://learn.laravel.com/. Meetups will be a new focus at Laravel with direct support from the company and already have their own webpage here: https://community.laravel.com/

Taylor Otwell (Founder/CEO @ Laravel), Adam Wathan (CEO & creator of Tailwind CSS), Jeffrey Way (Founder @ Laracasts), Evan You (creator of Vue.js) - OSS Panel / Closing

The closing panel was surprisingly long and insightful, so much so that I'm going to post it on its own Part 3 of my recap, coming soon!